"The very best thing you can be in life is a teacher, provided that you are crazy in love with what you teach, and that your classes consist of eighteen students or fewer. Classes of eighteen students or fewer are a family, and feel and act like one." Kurt Vonnegut

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Monday, February 27, 2017

Dress Code

Shame:
A Documentary on School Dress Code[i].
This is a documentary by a 17-year-old student, available on YouTube. This
could be a text in this unit or a model for documentaries created by students.

“Why
School Dress Codes Are Sexist,” Li Zhou (The Atlantic).[ii]
This is a well-written work of journalism that covers the topic of sexism in
dress codes well and serves as a strong model for public writing that uses
hyperlinks as citation.

“Sexualization,
Sex Discrimination, and Public School Dress Codes,” Meredith J. Harbach.[iii]
Here, students can examine a scholarly approach to the issues of sexism and
dress codes.

“The Unspoken Messages of Dress Codes:
Uncovering Bias and Power,” Rosalind
Wiseman (Anti-Defamation League).[iv]
A curriculum resource and excellent overview, this can serve as a guideline for
students lobbying for changes to dress codes and/or writing alternative codes
that avoid bias.

“Baby
Woman,” Emily Ratajkowski (Lenny).[v] Ratajkowski is a
contemporary celebrity, model and actress, who takes a strong public position
as a feminist, despite her association with provocative and sexualized media (controversial
music videos and TV commercials). Her personal narrative is a strong model of
the genre, but it also complicates views of feminism and female sexuality as
well as objectification.

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Raising Our Hands

from "Married to the Sea"

“Arts of the Possible,” Adrienne Rich (2001)

Universal public education has two possible—and contradictory—missions. One is the development of a literate, articulate, and well-informed citizenry so that the democratic process can continue to evolve and the promise of radical equality can be brought closer to realization.The other is the perpetuation of a class system dividing an elite, nominally “gifted” few, tracked from an early age, from a very large underclass essentially to be written off as alienated from language and science, from poetry and politics, from history and hope—toward low-wage temporary jobs.The second is the direction our society has taken. The results are devastating in terms of the betrayal of a generation of youth.The loss to the whole of society is incalculable. (p. 162)

Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers

“One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it.”

Education

"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."Henry David Thoreau